Events: Department Colloquium and Lecture Series

News

We are very proud to announce that Simion Filip has won the prestigious
Harper Dissertation Fellowship. For more information, please see here.
— July 19, 2015

We are very happy to congratulate our colleague, Laci Babai, the George and
Elizabeth Yovovich Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics, who has
been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For some more
information, see here.
— April 29, 2015

We are happy to congratulate Alex Eskin, Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished
Service Professor of Mathematics, on being elected to the National Academy
of Sciences. Please see here for the announcement.
— April 28, 2015

There was recently a conference in honor of Sid Webster and his many
important contributions to Complex Analysis and Geometry. You might enjoy
perusing the photos linked to the conference web site.
— April 14, 2015

We are happy to congratulate Takis Souganidis, who has been elected as a
Fellow of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) "for
contributions to the theory and numerical solution of both deterministic
and stochastic partial differential equations and their applications."

The Chicago Public School science fair will be awarding $2500 in prizes for
outstanding math research projects this year and into the future. The top
prize, $233 (prime AND Fibonacci!), will be named in honor of Professor
Sally, in honor of his incredible impact in bringing high-quality
mathematics to students in Chicago. The awards paragraph will read:

*Paul J. Sally, Jr. Prize for Outstanding Mathematical Research by a Young
Mathematician*

One (1) award of $233 to an outstanding work of research in mathematics

Professor Paul J. Sally, Jr. (1933-2013) was a professor of mathematics
and, for more than 30 years, the director of undergraduate studies at the
University of Chicago. It is likely that no single person has had as much
impact as Professor Sally in ensuring that students across the city of
Chicago learn high-quality mathematics. Professor Sally was one of the
founders of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project, a
textbook and curriculum production team that proved that ordinary
elementary and high school students could learn deep, genuine mathematics
thoughtfully and well and whose materials are used throughout Chicago and
indeed the United States to this day. The SESAME program, which he started
and ran for over 20 years, brought hundreds of practicing elementary and
high school teachers to the University of Chicago to learn mathematics from
professors of the highest caliber. The summer program he co-founded in
1988, the Young Scholars Program, continues to serve hundreds of students
each year, teaching mathematics from tessellations to Galois Theory to
children in grades 6-12, while training undergraduate and graduate students
in the arts of teaching and mathematical research. Many of the people
Professor Sally taught became mathematicians, but among Chicago's
mathematics teachers (and teachers of mathematics teachers) are dozens of
his own students, all of whom aspire to provide children with the kinds of
exciting mathematics they experienced with Professor Sally.
— March 1, 2015

We are very proud of our fourth year student Anne Marsden who has won the
prestigious Churchill Fellowship to study at Cambridge. Congratulations, Anne!
More details can be found at here.
— January 22, 2015

This year, Simion Filip has received the department's Izaak Wirszup memorial prize for excellence in research. Simion works on the geometry and dynamics of the moduli space of abelian differentials on surfaces.
Katharine Turner has won the Nadine Kowalsky prize. Katharine's work
is on applied algebraic topology. The award is established through a
bequest from Walter and Yvonne Kowalsky in memory of their daughter
Nadine Kowalsky, who died of leukemia in 1996. Nadine graduated from
the University of Chicago in 1994 with a dissertation directed by
Robert Zimmer.
— October 29, 2014

We are happy to announce that Professor Grigori Margulis of Yale
University will be receiving an honorary doctorate at our coming
convocation. Margulis's work has changed several areas of mathematics
and been an inspiration to many of the members of our department.— May 29, 2014

Congratulations to Jun Hou Fung, Benjamin Gammage, Sarah Peluse, Jesse
Silliman, and Weston Ungemach for receiving the Mathematics
Department's Cohen Prize. The Paul R. Cohen Memorial Prize is
awarded to the graduating seniors in the field of Mathematics who have
achieved the highest record in mathematics. Congratulations, also, to
Sarah Peluse on receiving an NSF graduate fellowship.

Carlos Kenig was elected to membership in the National Academy of
Sciences. For more information, please see here. — April 29, 2014.

Congratulations to Maryanthe Malliaris for being a recipient of a
Sloan Foundation research fellowship. Please see here and here for more details. — February 18, 2014

We are very happy to congratulate our current graduates Galyna Dobrovolska and Ilya Gekhtman who have received NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships and Alex Wright who has received a Clay Fellowship. They will be going to Columbia, Yale and Stanford respectively. — February 13, 2014

Paul Sally has been named as the first recipient of the AMS Award for Impact on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics. Happily, he received word of this award in late December of last year. — January 9, 2014

The mathematical world and the University of Chicago lost one of its beloved and
honored members on December 30, 2013. Paul Sally was a specialist in harmonic analysis on semi-simple groups and a renowned educator.

Paul received his Ph.D. in 1965 from Brandeis and then moved to the University of Chicago as an instructor. He quickly moved up the ranks on the basis of his excellent work on representation theory of p-adic groups, and was the chairman from 1977-1980. Since 1984, Paul was Director of Undergraduate Studies of the Mathematics department, where he has had enormous impact on the undergraduate program at the University of Chicago. Paul also had 19 Ph.D. students whose accomplishments gave him great satisfaction.

Paul’s seminal work with Joseph Shalika on SL(2) in the late 1960s ushered in an era of rapid development in harmonic analysis on reductive p-adic groups, an area of mathematics that lies at the intersection of many mathematical fields including number theory, algebra, analysis, and geometry. Within this area, Paul’s research focused on questions surrounding the Plancherel formula, specifically the computation of the characters of irreducible representations and the explicit understanding of the Fourier transforms of orbital integrals. As a mentor and agitator in this and allied fields, his influence extended well beyond his own work.

Moreover, Paul’s influence on mathematics extended far beyond the research work that he and his collaborators and students produced. He was involved with the Chicago Public Schools starting in 1969, when he ran a math competition and conducted classes for students and teachers. From 1983 to 1987 he was the first director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP). In 1992, Paul founded the Seminars for Elementary Specialists and Mathematics Educators (SESAME), a staff development program for elementary school teachers in Chicago public schools. Since the program’s inception, more than 600 teachers from 125 schools have participated in SESAME. In 1988, Paul, together with Diane Herrmann, began another enterprise, the University of Chicago Young Scholars Program for mathematically talented 7-12 grade students. The Mathematics department has recruited faculty from among the graduates of this program.

Paul also had a large role in the administration of the AMS (American Mathematical Society), having served in the Council and the Executive committee and as a trustee as well as several other committees over the years. He also was on the advisory committee for the mathematical sciences at the NSF. He served on two influential National Academy committees on mathematics education, and was recognized by numerous awards for his contributions to teaching: among his distinctions, Paul won the Quantrell Award for excellent undergraduate teaching at the University, and the Haimo award of the Mathematical Association of America. He was a fellow of the AMS.

Paul was a great believer in Mathematics and in the possibilities of people to achieve. He was an inspiration to many with his indomitable spirit. He constantly demanded from instructors and students complete devotion to Mathematics, and was remarkably successful in eliciting this: it is impossible to give a blind double amputee excuses for shirking. Paul held his views strongly, and was always willing to express and defend them. (He first came to prominence within the university community for opposing the harsh treatment of Vietnam War protesting students, thereby gaining a reputation as a radical.) He loved a good argument, but in the end, felt that the way to accomplish things was by doing, not by talking. Paul had indeed accomplished much, although he has left many unfinished plans - he was among those who believed that if you are working on project that can be completed in one lifetime, then you are thinking too small. We will miss him.

Paul is survived by his wife Judy, three sons David, Steven and Paul III, and their families.

There is a fascinating video interview with Paul in the Simons foundation’s Science Lives Project, which features in-depth interviews with "some giants of twentieth century mathematics and science.". Other recent interviews can be found at
here,
here and pp 6-7 of here.

Please see here for an obituary of Paul Sally by the University. — January 2, 2014

We are happy to congratulate Amie Wilkinson for her election as a Fellow of the AMS in the 2013 class of Fellows "for contributions to dynamical systems". — January 2, 2014

Benson Farb will be giving the joint MAA-AMS address at the annual
joint meeting in January. His talk will be on on Braids, Homology and
Polynomials: An Emerging Pattern in Algebra and Topology - See more
at here. — December 19, 2013

We are very happy to congratulate Sarah Peluse for winning the Alice
T. Schafer prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate
Woman of the AWM. She will receive it at the annual meeting of the
AMS. For more information, please see here. — December 16, 2013

We are happy to congratulate Shmuel Weinberger on his election as a fellow
of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. For more details,
see here. — December 5, 2013

Matt Emerton, Benson Farb, Wilhelm Schlag and Luis Silvestre will be
speaking at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul this coming
summer, in Number Theory, Topology, Analysis and Partial Differential
Equations, respectively. For more information, see
here.— October 31, 2013

The recent issue of PNAS contains the announcement of Maryanthe
Malliaris's solution, with Saharon Shelah, of the longstanding "p = t"
problem in set theory. It also contains a commentary
explaining something about the problem and some of its
context. — August 20, 2013

The AMS calendar has a wonderful series of mathematical images.
This month's image is the work of Diane Herrmann, Senior Lecturer and
Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies. You can see it here
(PDF, images may take some time to load). — August
12, 2013

We are happy to announce that Greg Lawler has been
appointed the George Wells Beadle Distinguished Service Professor in
Mathematics and Statistics. — July 29, 2013

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